California lawmakers Leland Yee, from left, Ted Lieu and Carol Liu announced they would switch their vote that would have rolled back Prop 209.

Three Asian-American state senators killed an effort to reinstate affirmative action for college admissions in California. On Monday, Assembly Speaker John Perez announced he was shelving a bill that would have rolled back Prop 209, the 1996 ballot initiative that banned the practice, after the three legislators switched their votes to oppose the bill.

The three lawmakers -- San Francisco's Leland Yee, and Ted Lieu and Carol Liu, both of Los Angeles County -- said they were reversing their stances after hearing from Asian-American constituents who worried that undoing Prop 209 would harm their children's chances regarding college admissions.

"As lifelong advocates for the Asian-American and other communities, we would never support a policy that we believed would negatively impact our children," the three senators said in a letter to Perez, according to the Sacramento Bee.

The announcement was an ironic reversal for the debate over Prop 209, which critics have long attacked as harmful to racial minorities. Growth in the Golden State's Asian-American population, which went from 10 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 2010, appears to have shifted the coalitions regarding the issue.